Ache

Some backstory, since I’ve only posted about this on Twitter: I got a part-time job! I will be working Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays doing web development for a local company. Wesley will be in daycare Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for the month of May so I can work on a fast-paced freelance job on my days off from the new part-time job, and then the plan is to drop him down to just Wednesdays at daycare once that project is completed.

My heart hurts today. It’s day three of daycare for Wesley, and this morning’s dropoff was horrible. He’s normally really easy-going and happy to play with toys and other babies, and we tried to talk it up to him beforehand (“You get to play with babies all day!”) but dropoffs got progressively worse this week, culminating in this morning whereby the teacher had to hold him on her lap while he scream-cried for me as I tried to back out the door.

I got in the car and cried.

I’ve felt so, so guilty and awful and on the verge of tears all day today. He’s fine, I know he’s fine, but it’s still so hard to leave him. He’s never really been… sentient? when I’ve had to use daycare in the past. Now he understands that Daddy goes to work (AKA The Place With The Muffins) and Mommy stays home with Wecky, and this new “Mommy work” with “pooters” (computers) means he doesn’t see either of his parents all day and he is not pleased.

I thought in some ways it’d be easier now that he’s older and not a helpless infant, but in many ways I am realizing it is FAR WORSE.

Day one, he started bawling “MOMMY DADDY! MOMMY DADDY!” when I picked him up, and it took several minutes to calm him down and reassure him that Mommy and Daddy didn’t leave forever, and Mommy was taking him home so we’d be there when Daddy got home. Day two, when I came to get him he was snotty and covered in tears and they said he did great up until the last ten-ish minutes, when several parents started showing up and he was looking around for his mommy and daddy and didn’t see them.

KNIFE, MEET HEART.

Plus, he doesn’t seem to nap very well there (maybe an hour, vs the two+ we get at home) so he comes home super cranky. They also don’t have daily sheets like I thought they would, the ones that say what he ate and when he napped and for how long. So when I get him in the afternoons, I do not have the faintest idea what he did all day and since he can’t talk super well, I can’t ask him what he did either. It just makes things that much harder than they need to be.

——

In addition to this, my paternal grandma passed away on Wednesday night, at the age of 87. She’s the one who taught me embroidery when I was ten, and always encouraged my craft projects. I have extremely fond memories of being ten or eleven years old, eating homemade bread with butter and jam at her kitchen table, while talking to her about life.

She always tried to get me to be less messy, telling me “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” She was the sort of lady who had her Christmas shopping finished in July, and never sent her Christmas cards out later than the first week of December. She handmade all of her grandchildren a Christmas ornament every year, so when we moved out and began our own lives, we’d have a whole collection of our own ornaments to use on our tree. She loved owls and hummingbirds. We’re holding a funeral for her and prepared a custom headstone representing her.

This has been a hard week.

File Under: Daycare, Family, General, Wesley

Tagged: No tags